Tagged: Nietzsche

No one commits suicide due to a moment’s transitory suffering. Suicide is by definition a last resort, which means that one turns to it only when other “resorts” have proved unsuccessful, i.e., when one feels that time and circumstance have provided no other solution to one’s suffering. The suicidal person, then, is responding to the accumulated despair of past suffering, or the accumulated...

Socrates and Plato made their criticism of the Greek sophists a central part of their respective philosophic missions. The core of their criticism: The sophists were paid teachers, who as such had a vested material interest in pleasing their listeners, rather than educating them. Thus, fathers brought their sons to the sophists for lessons in how to succeed in practical, political life. The...

Recently, a bright-eyed, enthusiastic Korean student asked me for winter reading recommendations. To choose appropriately, I engaged her in two hours’ general conversation aimed at gaining a better understanding of her character. At one point, I asked her the half-whimsical question, “If you were on a plane that was about to crash, whom would you want sitting next to you?” Her eyes widened...

During his final sane months, in a whirlwind of productivity, Nietzsche wrote three important works, the greatest of which was Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer, a terse but sweeping synopsis of his entire philosophy. Though in form a small book, in content, implications, and influence, it is enormous as only a handful of works have ever been....

From Twilight of the Idols: To live alone one must be an animal or a god — says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both — a philosopher. (R.J. Hollingdale translation, 1968.) True — but why does Nietzsche assume that Aristotle had not thought of that? My suggestion: the hubris of exceptional youth. Nietzsche completed Twilight of the Idols...

On Friday, Ireland, a traditionally Catholic country, voted overwhelmingly to legalize abortion, which means that if you walk the streets of Dublin today, most of the people you meet will be supporters of killing human life to facilitate irresponsible pleasure. Meanwhile, halfway around the world in Korea, a democratically elected Korean president embraced and held hands with a grotesque brute responsible for the...

Those of us who believe we are living through a moment of final civilizational decline — to be clear, that’s “final” as in “last stage,” not “the absolute end of everything” — often cite late modernity’s fall into nihilism as either a symptom of the decline, a cause of it, or both. Nihilism — broadly, the belief in nothing (nihil), i.e., the rejection...

A couple of days ago, I spent an idle hour rifling through Nietzsche’s Gay Science, one of my personal favorites among his books. Reading various familiar but half-forgotten aphorisms almost at random, I came across the following excellent passage discussing a very “German” topic on which Nietzsche is always profound, scholars. Specifically, Nietzsche is addressing the problem of the scholar through the lens...

Back when the world was young — August 3rd, 2012, to be exact — I published an essay at American Thinker entitled “Conservatives Have a Secret,” in which I explained the inevitability of America’s collapse into progressive chaos, but argued that this inevitability itself could be turned into a weapon of mass renewal, if serious conservatives played their cards right. Things haven’t gone...

On November 8th, the United States of America is staging (I choose that word carefully) a presidential election that will go down (and I also choose that word carefully) in history as the most terrifying, banal, hideous, and irrational exercise in the entire spotty narrative of Western democracy. The nation on whose fate largely rests that of the whole Earth at this moment–the nation with the most money,...